Dark Reading Matter - (Thursday Next Novel) by Jasper Fforde (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The final novel in the New York Times bestselling series: Will literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next find her happy ending?

The Dark Reading Matter is a theoretical realm that suggests that the observable bookverse can only account for 20 percent of the calculated total readable mass. Out there somewhere, possibly, is a larger and more expansive and unseeable "Dark Bookverse" that contains millions of deleted novels, slush-pile manuscripts, lost poems, forgotten pop culture references, long unheard oral tradition, stories and ideas that were still in people's minds when they died.

The Goliath Corporation hopes to exploit the Dark Reading Matter for profit, and Thursday Next is once again pitted against a familiar foe. A visitor named Roger Thatt who purports to be from Fourth Wall Publishing has some peculiar ideas of his own that require careful thought. Is Thursday and everyone she knows living in a simulation? Was her world created from scratch Last Thursday as Roger supposes, and are the books she reads the only direction in which books can be read?

With existential questions the least of her troubles and a family to take care of, Thursday must defeat the Goliath Corporation, ensure that a tear in the fabric of the Bookworld does not suck all literature from hers, and conclude her own series so she can enjoy a comfortable retirement, while dodging the threat of the worse fate imaginable for a story: The Scooby Doo ending.

Review Quotes

Praise for the Thursday Next Books

"Playful . . . It's not hard to see what this enthusiasm is about . . . It's easy to be delighted by a writer who loves books so madly."
--Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"What keeps this series humming is Fforde's lively engagement with books and the indefatigable woman he's created to defend them."
--People

"Richly crammed with jokes, ideas, and action. Brainier silliness is hard to find."
--USA Today

"Reading a truly good book, the page opens like a trapdoor and you simply fall through. The Eyre Affair takes that feeling, the moment you lose the sense of yourself and become engrossed in the story, and creates high adventure and wild drama around the porous boundaries between fiction and real life."
--The Guardian

"Jam-packed with spot-on parody, puns and wry observations about words and genres that will delight literary-minded fans of the series."
--Los Angeles Times

"In Misery, Stephen King compares the euphoric feeling writers experience in creative bursts to 'falling into a hole filled with bright light.' Avid readers also know that feeling: A good story temporarily erases the world. British novelist Jasper Fforde has expanded on King's simile in a wonderful seven-book series of novels featuring Thursday Next. Enormously knowledgeable about literary history, Fforde scatters nuggets for nerdy readers like me. By the end, all of Fforde's myriad particles of plot, accelerated by his immense skill and narrative sense, collide, producing pyrotechnics and a passel of new particles to propel his next tale. I love the Thursday Next books, and when a new one appears, I don't fall but leap into this bibliophile's Wonderland."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another fifteen novels, including The Big Over Easy, The Constant Rabbit, and Shades of Grey. Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales. Visit Jasper's website, www.jasperfforde.com, find him on Facebook, www.facebook.com/jasperffordebooks, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/jasperfforde.